A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

Eleven. Comrade Alberto

I spent the summer of 1953 shut up in my grandparents’ apartment, in the white townhouse on the Calle Porta, studying for the entrance exam to the University of San Marcos, writing a play (it took place on a desert island, with storms), and writing poems to a young neighbor, Madeleine, whose mother, who was French, was the owner of the house. It was another half-romance, not because of my timidity this time but due to the very strict watch kept by Madeleine’s mother on her blond daughter. (Almost thirty years later, one night as I was going into the Teatro Marsano in Lima, where they were giving the first performance of a work of mine, a pretty lady whom I did not recognize blocked my path. With an indescribable smile she handed me one of those same love poems, whose first verse, the only one I dared read, made my face turn as red as a torch.)

We took the examination for admission to the Faculty of Letters in one of the old houses belonging to San Marcos scattered all through the downtown district of Lima, on the Calle de Padre Jerónimo, where a phantasmagoric Institute of Geography did its work. I made two new friends that day, Lea Barba and Rafael Merino, who were candidates for admission as I was, and also shared my passion for reading. Rafo had been enrolled at the Police Academy before deciding to study law. Lea was the daughter of one of the owners of the Negro-Negro, all of them descended from an anarcho-syndicalist leader of the famous workers’ battles in the 1920s. Between one exam and the next, and during the days and weeks of waiting to be summoned to the oral exam, Rafo and Lea and I talked about literature and politics, and I felt rewarded for the long wait by being able to share my anxieties with people my own age. Lea talked so enthusiastically of César Vallejo, some of whose poems she knew by heart, that I began to read him attentively, trying my best to come to like him at least as much as I did Neruda, whom I had read since high school with constant admiration.

We occasionally went with Rafael Merino to the beach, we exchanged books, and I read him short stories that I’d written. But with Lea it was politics above all that we discussed, in a conspiratorial spirit. We confessed that we were enemies of the dictatorship and supporters of revolution and of Marxism. But could there possibly be any Communists left in Peru? Hadn’t Esparza Zañartu killed, jailed, or deported all of them? At the time, Esparza Zañartu occupied the obscure post of administrative head of the Ministry of the Interior, but the whole country knew that that person without a history or a political past, whom General Odría had lured away from his modest wine business to bring him into the government, was the brain behind that security to which the dictatorship owed its power, the man behind the censorship of the press and radio broadcasts, and behind the detention and deportations, and also the one who had put together the network of spies and informers in labor unions, universities, public posts, and the communications media, the one who had kept any effective opposition against the regime from developing.

Nonetheless, the year before, 1952, the University of San Marcos, faithful to its tradition of rebellion, had defied Odría. On the pretext that they were reclaiming their rights as university students, those at San Marcos had demanded the resignation of the rector, Pedro Dulanto, gone out on strike, and occupied the university’s traditionally inviolable inner grounds, which the police entered to drive them out. Almost all the leaders of the strike were in jail or had been deported. Lea knew many details about what had happened, about the debates in the San Marcos Federation and its allied chapters and the underground battles between Apristas and Communists (both of them groups persecuted by the government but each other’s merciless enemies), to which I listened openmouthed.

Lea was the first girl whose fast friend I became who had not been brought up, as had my girlfriends from the barrio in Miraflores, to get married as soon as possible and be a good housewife. She had an intellectual background and was determined to get into San Marcos, to practice her profession, to stand on her own two feet. While she was intelligent and possessed of a strong personality, she was gentle at the same time, and could be so tenderhearted as to be moved to tears by a story about an incident in someone’s life. I think she was the first one to talk to me about José Carlos Mariátegui, the Marxist ideologue, and the Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality). Even before classes started, we became inseparable. We went to exhibitions, to bookstores, and to the movies — to see French films, of course, in the two art houses downtown that showed them, Le Paris and Biarritz.

On the day I turned up on the Calle Fano to learn the results of the entrance exams, the minute they discovered my name on the list of those who had passed, a group lying in wait flung itself on me and baptized me. The San Marcos baptism was humane: they gave you a really short crew cut so as to oblige you to shave your head. From the Calle Fano I went with my close-cropped head to buy myself a beret and to a barbershop on La Colmena to get myself sheared almost to the scalp, so that my head looked like a coconut.

I had enrolled at the Alliance Française, so as to learn French. Two of us in my class were males: a young black who was studying chemistry and myself. The twenty or so females — all of them well-brought-up girls from Miraflores and San Isidro — amused themselves at our expense, making fun of our accent in French and playing pranks on us. After a few weeks, the black got fed up with their mockery and gave up coming to class. My shorn head as a San Marcos freshman was, of course, the object of the irreverence and hilarity of those fearsome girl classmates (among them was a Miss Peru). But I enjoyed the classes taught by the wonderful instructor, Madame del Solar, thanks to whom I was able within a few weeks to begin to read in French, with the aid of dictionaries. I spent many blissful hours in the little library of the Alliance, on the Avenida Wilson, peeking into magazines and reading such authors of transparent prose as Gide, Camus, or Saint-Exupéry, who gave me the illusion of having mastered the language of Montaigne.

In order to have a little money, I spoke with Uncle Jorge, the one in the family with the best job. He was the manager of a construction company and he gave me work by the hour to do — making bank deposits, writing letters and other documents, and taking them to government offices — which did not interfere with my classes. In that way I was able to buy cigarettes — I smoked like that proverbial bat, always dark tobacco, Incas at first and later on oval-shaped National Presidents — and to go to the movies. Shortly thereafter I got another, more intellectual job: a writer for Turismo magazine. The owner and managing editor was Jorge Holguín de Lavalle (1894–1973), a very fine sketch artist and cartoonist, who had been famous thirty years before, in the big magazines of the 1920s, Variedades and Mundial. An aristocrat and very poor, a Limeño to the bone, an indefatigable and charming raconteur of traditions, myths, and gossip about the city, Holguín de Lavalle was an absent-minded dreamer who brought out the magazine when he remembered to, or rather, when he had garnered enough ads to pay for printing an issue. The magazine was laid out by him and written from first page to last by him and by the current staff writer. Well-known intellectuals had passed by way of the magazine’s very scanty editorial staff, among them Sebastián Salazar Bondy, and Señor Jorge Holguín de Lavalle, on the day that I went to talk with him, reminded me of this, thereby indicating that, even though the pay would be a paltry sum, my succeeding such illustrious individuals in the job would make up for that fact.

I accepted the job, and from then on, for two years, I wrote half or perhaps three-quarters of the magazine under different pseudonyms (among them the French-sounding Vincent Naxé, with which I signed the drama reviews). Of all that material I remember one text, “En torno a una escultura” (“Concerning a Statue”), written in protest against a barbarous deed committed during the dictatorship by the minister of education, General Zenón Noriega, who ordered the handsome statue of the hero withdrawn from the sculpture group of the monument to Bolognesi (created by the Spaniard Agustín Querol) because his pose did not strike General Zenón as heroic. And he had the original image of Bolognesi — shown at the moment he fell to the ground riddled with bullets — replaced by the grotesque puppet waving a flag that today makes what was once one of the fine monuments of Lima among its ugliest. Holguín de Lavalle was indignant at the mutilation but feared that my article would anger the government and the magazine would be closed down. In the end, he published it and nothing happened. With my salary from Turismo, four hundred soles per issue — and the magazine didn’t come out every month, but only every second or even every third month — I could pay for (what days those were and how solid the Peruvian sol was!) subscriptions to two French periodicals, Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes and Maurice Nadeau’s Les Lettres Modernes, which I went to pick up, every month, at a little downtown office. I was able to live on this income — at my grandparents’ I didn’t pay for either my room or my board — and above all I had free time to read, for San Marcos and, in a very short time, for the revolution.

Classes began late, and with one exception, they were disappointing. San Marcos hadn’t yet fallen into the decadence that in the 1960s and 1970s was little by little to turn it into the caricature of a university, and later on into a bastion of Maoism and even terrorism, but it was no longer even a shadow of what it had been in the 1920s, in the days of the famous generation of the 1919 Conversatorio, its high point as far as the humanities were concerned.

Of that famous generation of the Conversatorio two historians — Jorge Basadre and Raúl Porras Barrenechea — were still at San Marcos, and a few illustrious figures of a previous generation, such as Mariano Iberico in philosophy, or Luis Valcárcel in ethnology. And the Faculty of Medicine, in which Honorio Delgado taught, had as professors the best doctors in Lima. But the atmosphere and the way classes were conducted at the university were neither creative nor demanding. There was a breakdown both of morale and of intellectual standards, still not particularly noticeable, although widespread; professors skipped one class and turned up at the next, and along with some who were competent, others were of a mediocrity that put the students in their classes to sleep. Before entering the Faculty of Law and before becoming a candidate for a degree in literature, a student had to have had two years of general studies, among which there could be several electives. All the ones I chose were literature courses.

The majority of them were given without enthusiasm, by professors who did not know very much or who had lost all interest in teaching. But among these courses I remember one that ranks among the best intellectual experiences I have ever had: Sources of Peruvian History, given by Raúl Porras Barrenechea.

To me, that course, and what stemmed from it, justifies the years I spent at San Marcos. Its subject could not have been more limited or scholarly, since it was not about Peruvian history but about where to study it. But thanks to the wisdom and eloquence of the professor giving it, every lecture was a formidable display of knowledge about the past of Peru and the contradictory versions and interpretations of it that chroniclers, travelers, explorers, literati had offered, in the most diverse collections of correspondence and documents imaginable. Pintsized, potbellied, dressed in mourning — for the death, that year, of his mother — with a very broad forehead, blue eyes boiling over with irony and lapels covered with dandruff, Porras Barrenechea turned into a giant on the little classroom dais and every last one of his words was followed by us with religious devotion. He lectured with consummate elegance, in a pungent and pure Spanish — he had begun his university career teaching the classics of the Golden Age, which he had thoroughly mastered, and traces of this mastery remained in his prose and in the precision and magnificence with which he expressed himself — yet he was not, even remotely, the garrulous professor, an empty-headed wordmonger who listens to himself talk. Porras was a fanatic when it came to exactitude and he was incapable of stating anything about anything that he hadn’t thoroughly checked. His splendid lectures were always documented by his reading from note cards in his minute handwriting, raising them up close to his eyes so as to decipher them. In each one of his classes we had the sensation that we were hearing something not to be found in any book, the result of personal research. The following year, when I began to work with him, I discovered that, in fact, Porras Barrenechea prepared that course, which he had been giving for so many years, with the rigor of someone about to face a class for the first time.

In my first two years at San Marcos I was someone I hadn’t been in high school: a very diligent student. I studied all my courses thoroughly, even the ones I didn’t like, handing in every one of the assignments given us, and in some cases asking the professor for a supplementary list of books, so as to go read them at the San Marcos library or at the National Library on the Avenida Abancay, in both of which I spent many hours during those first two years. Although they were far from being exemplary — at the National one had to share the reading room with very young schoolchildren who went there to do their homework and turned the place into a madhouse — I acquired there the habit of reading in libraries and I have frequented them ever since, in all the cities I have lived in, and in one of them, the beloved Reading Room of the British Museum, I have even written a good part of my books.

But in none of the courses I took did I read and work as much as for Sources of Peruvian History, dazzled as I was by Porras Barrenechea’s brilliance. After a masterly class on pre-Hispanic myths, I remember having rushed to the library in search of two books that he had cited, and although one of them, by Ernst Cassirer, defeated me almost immediately, the other was one of the most impressive of my readings of 1953: Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Porras’s course had such a great influence on me that during those first months at the university I often came to the point of asking myself whether I ought to specialize in history instead of literature, since the former, embodied in Porras Barrenechea, had all the color, the dramatic power, and the creativity of the latter, and seemed more deeply rooted in life.

I made good friends among my classmates and convinced a group of them that we should put on a play. We chose a comedy of manners, by Pardo y Aliaga, and even had copies of it made and cast the roles, but in the end the project came to nothing, through my own fault, I believe, since I had already begun to be active in politics, which started to absorb more and more of my time.

Of that whole group of friends, Nelly Alba was a special case. She had studied piano at the Conservatory since she’d been a little girl, and her vocation was music, but she had entered San Marcos to acquire an overall culture. From our first conversations under the palm trees of the courtyard of the Faculty of Letters, my lack of musical culture horrified her, and she took on the task of educating me, taking me to concerts at the Teatro Municipal, in the first row of the balcony, and passed on to me a somewhat hasty smattering of information about interpretative artists and composers. I gave her advice on what literary works she should read, and I remember how much the two of us liked the volumes of Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe, which we bought, a volume or two at a time, in Juan Mejía Baca’s bookstore, on the Calle Azángaro. The kindly, effusive Don Juan gave us the books on credit and let us pay him in monthly installments. To pass by that bookstore once or twice a week, to have a look at what was new, was obligatory. And on days when we were lucky, Mejía Baca invited us to the tavern next door, to have a coffee and a hot meat pie, on him.

But the person I saw most often, every day in fact, inside and outside of classes, was Lea. Shortly after the beginning of the academic year, we had been joined by another student, Félix Arias Schreiber, with whom we were soon to constitute a triumvirate. Félix had entered San Marcos the year before, but had had to break off his studies because of illness, and therefore was in the freshman class with us. He belonged to a family of high social standing — one associated his surname with bankers, diplomats, and lawyers — but to a branch that was poor and perhaps even extremely poor. I don’t know whether his mother was a widow or separated from her husband, but Félix lived alone with her, in one of a group of little townhouses with a common entrance on the Avenida Arequipa, and although he had studied in Santa María, the private high school for rich kids in Lima, he never had a cent and it was plain to see, from the way he acted and dressed, that he was having a hard time making ends meet. Félix’s political vocation was much stronger — in his case excluding every other interest — than Lea’s or mine. He already knew a bit about Marxism, he had a few books and pamphlets which he lent to us, and which I read in a state of bedazzlement at the forbidden nature of such fruits, which I had to carry around with paper covers concealing them so they would not be detected by the stool pigeons that Esparza Zañartu had infiltrated into San Marcos to flush out what La Prensa called “subversive elements” and “agitators.” (All the daily papers of the period backed the dictatorship and, it goes without saying, were anti-Communist, but Pedro Beltrán’s La Prensa was more so than all the others put together.) Once Félix joined us, other subjects were relegated to a secondary place and it was politics — or rather, socialism and revolution — that our conversations centered on. We chatted together in the patios of San Marcos — still located in the old mansion of the Parque Universitario, right in downtown Lima — or in little coffeehouses on La Colmena or Azángaro, and Lea sometimes took us to have coffee or a Coca-Cola on the downstairs floor of the Negro-Negro, in the arcades of the Plaza San Martín. By contrast to my earlier visits to the place, during my bohemian days on La Crónica, I didn’t drink a drop of alcohol now and we talked about very serious things: the abuses committed by the dictatorship, the great ethical, political, economic, scientific, and cultural changes that were taking place in the U.S.S.R. (“in that country / where there exist / neither whores, thieves, nor priests,” Paul Éluard’s poem said), or in the China of Mao Tsetung that the French writer Claude Roy had visited and about which he had written so many marvelous things, in Clefs pour la Chine (Into China), a book whose every word we believed implicitly.

Our conversations went on till late at night. Often we walked back from downtown to Lea’s house, on Petit Thouars, and then Félix and I went on to his house on the Avenida Arequipa, almost as far out as Angamos, and I then went on alone to the Calle Porta. The walk from the Plaza San Martín to my house took an hour and a half. Granny left me my dinner on the table and it didn’t matter to me that it was cold (it was always the same, the only dish I could finish in those days: rice with breaded beef cutlets and fried potatoes). And if food didn’t matter much to me (“For the poet, food is prose,” my grandfather teased me), I didn’t need much sleep either, for, even though I climbed into bed late at night, I read for hours before going to sleep. I indulged in friendship with my usual passionate enthusiasm and exclusivism, and Félix and Lea became a full-time occupation; when I wasn’t with them, I was thinking how good it was to have friends like them, three of us who got along together so well and were planning a shared future. I also thought, although I was careful to keep it to myself, that I shouldn’t fall in love with Lea, because it would be fatal for the trio we formed. What was more, wasn’t the whole business of falling in love a typical bourgeois weakness, inconceivable in a revolutionary?

Around that time, we had made the longed-for contact. In one of the courtyards of San Marcos, someone had approached us, found out who we were, and, in a seemingly offhand way, asked what we thought of the students who were in jail, or questioned us about cultural subjects that, unfortunately, were not taught at the university — dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and scientific socialism, for example — subjects that anyone with an eye to the future ought to know about, as a matter of general information. And the second or third time, returning to the same subject, he had casually introduced into the discussion the question of whether it wouldn’t interest us to form a study group, to investigate those problems that censorship, the fear of the dictatorship, or the fact that San Marcos was a bourgeois university kept from reaching it. Lea, Félix, and I said we’d be delighted. A month hadn’t yet gone by since we entered the university and already we were in a study group, the first step that should be followed by militants of Cahuide, the name under which the Communist Party was trying to regroup in secret after repression and desertions and internal divisions had caused it nearly to disappear in previous years.

Our first instructor in that circle was Héctor Béjar, who in the 1970s was to be the head of a guerrilla group, the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional: National Liberation Army), and spend several years in jail for that reason. He was a tall, likable lad, with a face as round as a wheel of cheese, with a voice that had a very fine timbre, which allowed him to earn his living as an announcer at Radio Central. He was a little older than we were — he was already in law school — and studying Marxism with him proved to be enjoyable, for he was intelligent and adept at conducting the circle’s discussions. The first book we studied was Georges Politzer’s Beginning Lessons in Philosophy, and then Marx’s Communist Manifesto and The Class Struggle in France, and after that Engels’s Anti-Dühring and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? We bought the books — and sometimes received in return, as a bonus, a back number of Cultura Soviética, on whose covers there were always smiling peasant lasses with robust cheeks, against a background of wheat fields and tractors — in a little bookstore on the Calle Pando, whose owner, a mustachioed Chilean always bundled up in a little scarf, kept a great deal of subversive literature hidden in a trunk in the back room of his shop. Later on, when I read Conrad’s novels, full of shady conspirators, the mysterious, ashen face of that bookseller who purveyed clandestine books always came back to my mind.

We met in places that kept changing. In a miserable little room, at the back of an old building on the Avenida Abancay, where one of our comrades lived, or in a little house on Bajo el Puente, the home of a very pale girl whom we baptized the Bird, where one day we had a sudden scare, for in the middle of our discussion, a soldier showed up. He was the Bird’s brother and wasn’t surprised at seeing us; but we didn’t go back there. Or in the rooming house in Barrios Altos, whose woman owner, a discreet sympathizer, lent us a room full of spider webs, at the far end of a garden. I belonged to at least four circles and the following year became the instructor and organizer of one of them, and I have forgotten the faces and the names of the comrades who taught me in them, of those who were taught along with me, and those whom I taught. But I remember very well those of the first circle, with the majority of whom we eventually formed a cell, when we began to take militant action in Cahuide. Besides Félix and Lea, there was a skinny young man with a voice as thin as a thread, in whom everything was small-sized: the knot in his tie, his tiny polite gestures, the little steps he took to get around in the world. His name was Podestá and he was the one who was nominally in charge of our cell. Martínez, on the other hand, a student studying for a degree in anthropology, was as hale and hearty as they come: he was an Indian, strong and warm, a dogged worker whose reports in the group were always interminable. His coppery, stony face never changed expression, and not even the most heated debates ever disturbed that impassivity. Antonio Muñoz, a highlander from Junín, on the other hand, had a sense of humor and allowed himself to break the mood of deadly seriousness of our meetings by making jokes now and again (I was to meet him once more, during the election campaign of 1989 and 1990, organizing committees of Libertad for the provinces of Junín). And there was also the Bird, that mysterious girl who made Félix, Lea, and me wonder at times whether she knew what the circle was all about, if she realized that she could be put in prison, that she was already a subversive militant. With her resplendent pallor and her delicate manners, the Bird dutifully did all the required reading and made reports, but she did not appear to absorb very much; one day she abruptly bade the circle goodbye, saying that she was going to be late for Mass…

After we’d been in the circle for a few weeks, Héctor Béjar decided that Lea, Félix, and I were ripe for a major commitment. Would we agree to an interview with a higher-up in the Party? We arranged to meet at nightfall, on the Avenida Pardo in Miraflores, and there was Washington Durán Abarca — at the time I was introduced to him only by his pseudonym — who surprised us by saying that the best way to dupe informers was to meet in bourgeois neighborhoods and out-of-doors. Sitting on a bench, under the ficus trees along the same promenade where I had tried without success to get the beautiful Flora Flores and other daughters of the bourgeoisie to fall for me, Washington gave us a synoptic picture of the history of the Communist Party, from its foundation in Peru by José Carlos Mariátegui, in 1928, up to our own day, when, under the name of Cahuide, it was being reborn from its ruins. After this historic beginning, under the inspiration of Mariátegui — whose Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana we also studied in the group — the Party had fallen into the hands of Eudocio Ravines, who, after having been its secretary general and acting as an envoy of the Comintern in Chile, Argentina, and Spain during the Spanish Civil War, had become a turncoat, assuming the role of Peru’s great anti-Communist and an ally of La Prensa and Pedro Beltrán. And, later on, the dictatorships and the severe repression had kept the Party outside the law and in hiding, surviving underground in more and more difficult conditions, with the brief exception of the three years of Bustamante y Rivero’s administration, in which it was able to surface and act in plain sight. But then “liquidating and antiworker” currents had undermined the organization, separating it from the masses and leading it to make deals with the bourgeoisie: one former leader of the Party, Juan P. Luna, for example, had sold out to Odría and was now one of the senators of the fraudulent Congress of the military regime. The real leaders of the Party such as Jorge del Prado were in exile or in prison (as was the case with Raúl Acosta, the last secretary general).

Despite all this, the Party was still active behind the scenes and in the past year had played a decisive role in the strike at San Marcos. Many comrades who participated in it were in exile or in the penitentiary. Cahuide had been formed by combining the surviving cells, until a congress could be convoked. It consisted of a student section and a workers’ section, and for reasons of security each cell knew only one responsible militant from the level immediately above. In no document or conversation were Party members’ real names to be used, only pseudonyms. One could enter Cahuide as a sympathizer or as a militant.

Félix and I said that we wanted to be sympathizers, but Lea asked for full membership immediately. The oath administered to her by Washington Durán, in the murmur of an altar boy, was a solemn one—“Do you swear to fight for the working class, for the Party…?”—and it impressed us. Then we had to choose our pseudonyms. Mine was Comrade Alberto.

Although we continued in the study circle, whose members and instructor changed every so often, the three of us began to work, at the same time, in a cell of the student section, which Podestá, Martínez and Muñoz also joined. The circumstances limited our militancy to handing out leaflets or selling, on the sly, a little clandestine periodical called Cahuide, for which several times I was called upon to write about international subjects from the “proletarian” and “dialectical” point of view. It cost fifty centavos and in it the two bêtes noires of the Party, the APRA and the Trotskyites, were attacked almost as severely as Odría’s dictatorship.

This first target is understandable. In 1953, and despite having had to go underground, the APRA still had control of the majority of the labor unions and was the first, in fact the only Peruvian political party for which the word popular was appropriate. It was precisely the deep roots of the APRA in the popular sectors that had been an obstacle in the way of the development of the Communist Party, up until that time a small organization of intellectuals, students, and little workers’ groups. At San Marcos then (and perhaps always), the vast majority of students were apolitical, with a vague preference for the left but without any party affiliation. Within the politicized sector, the majority of students were Apristas. And the Communists, a small minority, were concentrated above all in the Faculties of Letters, Economics, and Law.

What was practically nonexistent was Trotskyism, and it said a great deal about the ideological unreality in which Cahuide functioned that we dedicated so much time to denouncing a mere phantom in our leaflets or in our periodical. At that time there were no more than half a dozen Trotskyites at San Marcos, gathered around the person we thought of as their ideologue: Aníbal Quijano. The future sociologist held forth every morning in the courtyard of the Faculty of Letters, speaking in flowing words and devastatingly impressive statistics about the advances of Leon Davidovich Trotsky’s partisans in the Soviet Union itself. “We have 22,000 Trotskyite comrades within the Soviet armed forces,” I heard him announce, with a triumphant smile, in one of his perorations. And on another morning, one of Quijano’s supposed supporters, who was later to be an AP representative — Raúl Peña Cabrera — left me dumbfounded: “I know you’re studying Marxism. That’s fine. But you should take a broad view of it, without sectarianism.” And he presented me with a copy of Trotsky’s Revolution and Art, which I read in secret, with a morbid feeling of transgression. Only two or three years later the picturesque Ismael Frías would arrive, bundled up in an outlandish gray overcoat totally unsuited to the climate of Lima and with the appearance of an obese matron, to replace Peña and Quijano as the Trotskyite ideologue of Peru. At the time, in 1953, he was living in Mexico City, in Trotsky’s house in Coyoacán, where he officiated as the secretary of Trotsky’s illustrious widow, Natalia Sedova.

But just as it was very difficult, not to say impossible, to know who was a Trotskyite, it was also hard to identify the Apristas and our comrades. Outside of the people in our own cell and the leaders at higher levels who came to give us talks or instruction — such as the spirited Isaac Ahumala, who in his speeches invariably spoke of the helots of Greece and of Spartacus’s rebellion — only by divination or sympathetic magic was it possible to identify the militants of the parties that the military government had outlawed. Esparza Zañartu’s informers and the fierce animosity between Apristas and Communists, and between Communists and Trotskyites, all of whom suspected the others of being informers, made the political atmosphere of the university almost intolerable.

But finally it became possible for us to hold elections at the university for the student committees in the several Faculties and then for the University Federation of San Marcos (dismantled after the 1952 strike). Among the candidates put up by Cahuide from the Faculty of Letters, Félix and I were elected, and the two of us were also among the five delegates that the committee in our Faculty elected for the Federation. I don’t know how we managed this latter, since in both the committee and the Federation the majority were Apristas. And shortly thereafter an episode occurred which, as far as I was concerned, was to have literary consequences.

I have already said there were a fair number of students imprisoned. The Internal Security Act allowed the government to send any “subversive” to jail and keep him or her there for an indefinite period, without a court trial. The conditions in which those arrested found themselves in the penitentiary — a red building in the downtown area of Lima, where the Hotel Sheraton is also located, and which only years later I would discover to be one of the rare panopticons^* to have been built according to the instructions of Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher who invented them — were tough: they were obliged to sleep on the floor, without blankets or mattresses. We took up a collection to buy them blankets, but when we took them to the penitentiary, the warden informed us that those who had been arrested were incommunicado, because they were political prisoners — an infamous word during the dictatorship — and that only with the authorization of the administrative head of the Ministry of the Interior could the blankets be given to them.

Ought we, for humanitarian reasons, to ask for an interview with the brain of the repression under Odría? The subject gave rise to one of those discussions that leave everyone panting for breath, in the cell first, and then in the Federation. We were in the habit of discussing all questions beforehand in Cahuide, of planning a strategy and carrying it out in the student organizations, where we acted with a discipline and a coordination that very often allowed us to reach agreements despite our being a minority as compared to the Apristas. I don’t know what position we defended with regard to the request for an audience with Esparza Zañartu, but I do know that the discussions were intensely bitter. Finally, the request for the interview was approved. The Federation named a committee, among whose members were Martínez and I.

The administrative head of the Ministry of the Interior gave us a midmorning appointment, in his office on the Plaza Italia. We were overcome with nervousness and excitement as we waited, amid grease-stained walls, police in uniform and in civvies, and office clerks crowded together in claustrophobic little cubicles. Finally we were ushered into his office. There was Esparza Zañartu, in the flesh. He did not get to his feet to greet us, nor did he ask us to sit down. He impassively scrutinized us from his desk. I have never forgotten that bored face with the look of parchment. He was a ludicrous little man, around forty or fifty, or rather, ageless, modestly dressed, with a scrawny, decrepit body, the incarnation of the harmless, of the man without qualities (at least physically speaking). He gave an almost imperceptible nod to indicate to us to say what we wanted to, and without uttering a word, listened to those of us who took the responsibility for speaking up — or rather, for stammering out an explanation of the matter of the mattresses and blankets. He didn’t move a muscle and his mind appeared to be somewhere else, but he observed us as though we were insects. Finally, with the same expression of indifference, he opened a drawer, took out a pile of papers and waved them in our faces, murmuring “And what about this?” and shaking in his fist several issues of the clandestine Cahuide.

He said that he knew everything that was happening at San Marcos, including who it was who had written those articles. He thanked us for devoting our attention to him in every issue. But he warned us that we should be careful, because students went to the university to study and not to organize the Communist revolution. He spoke in a faint little voice without a cutting edge to it or subtle shadings, with the inexpressiveness and the mistakes in grammar of someone who has never read a book since leaving high school.

I don’t remember what happened about the bedding, but I do remember my impression on discovering how completely out of proportion to the mediocrity we had before us was the idea Peru had of the shadowy figure responsible for so many exiles, crimes, censorship decrees, and imprisonments. On leaving after that interview I realized that sooner or later I was going to write what would eventually become my novel Conversation in The Cathedral. (When the book appeared, in 1969, and journalists went out to ask Esparza Zañartu, who in those days was living in Chosica, devoting his time to philanthropical causes and horticulture, what he thought of that novel, whose main character, Cayo Mierda, bore such a close resemblance to him, he answered [I can just imagine his bored gesture]: “Listen…if Vargas Llosa had consulted me, I’d have told him so many things…”)

In the little more than a year that I was in Cahuide our epic revolutionary deeds were few and far between: an abortive attempt to get rid of a professor, a little periodical put out by the students’ committee that had trouble surviving for even two or three issues, and a strike at San Marcos to demonstrate our solidarity with streetcar workers. And in addition, a free academy to prepare students seeking admission to San Marcos, in which I taught the literature course; this permitted us to recruit members for the study circles and Cahuide. The right to get bad professors fired (which became the right to get rid of reactionary ones) was one of those achieved by the university reform movement of the 1920s; it was abolished after the military coup of 1948. We tried to revive it in order to get rid of our professor of logic, Dr. Saberbein — for reasons I don’t understand, since there were worse professors than he on the faculty — but we failed; in two tumultuous student assemblies, his defenders turned out to be more numerous than his attackers.

As for the periodical, my memory retains above all else the exhausting discussions in Cahuide concerning a trivial question: whether the articles should be signed or anonymous. Like everything we did, that too was the object of ideological analyses, in which the theses of all the participants were torn to pieces by dialectical and class arguments. The most serious accusation was: bourgeois subjectivism, idealism, lack of class consciousness. My readings of Sartre and Les Temps Modernes helped me to be less dogmatic than other comrades, and sometimes I dared to put forward certain Sartrean criticisms of Marxism, arousing the wrath of Félix, who, as he became more militant, had gradually become more and more inflexible and orthodox. The debate about signatures lasted for several days, and during one of these interchanges Félix lashed out at me with a devastating accusation: “You’re a subhombre—a subhuman.”

But, despite our disagreements in the internal debates of Cahuide (never in public), I went on being fond of him and of Lea, knowing full well that the business of being fond of one’s friends was bourgeois. And it had pained me a great deal when we were separated, first in the circle and then in the cell, where Lea and Félix were to remain together. On both occasions it had seemed to me that Félix, in a way that would be imperceptible for anyone who didn’t have very alert antennae, had slyly furthered that separation while at the same time giving every appearance of being resigned to it. Since I am by nature mistrustful and sensitive, I told myself that I was imagining conspiracies out of the envy I felt because they would be staying together. But I couldn’t help thinking that, with that ultimate inflexibility of his, Félix had perhaps schemed to bring that separation about so as to toughen me, curing me of sentimentality, one of my most stubborn class defects…

Despite that, we three continued to see a great deal of each other. I sought them out whenever I could. One afternoon — six or eight months must have gone by since we had first met — Lea told me she wanted to talk to me. I went to her house, on Petit Thouars, and found her alone. We went out for a walk along the promenade that ran down the middle of the Avenida Arequipa, beneath the tall trees, between the double rows of cars that were going downtown or toward the ocean. Lea was nervous. I felt her trembling in her light dress, and although in the dim light I could barely see her eyes — night was beginning to fall — I knew that they must be gleaming and a little damp, as always when something was greatly troubling her. I was very nervous too, waiting to hear her tell me what was on her mind. Finally, after a long silence, in a very faint voice, but without searching for words, because she always knew how to choose them well, whether in a conversation or in an argument, she told me what Félix had confided to her the night before. That he had been in love with her for some time, that she was more important to him than anything else, including the Party…I felt cramps in my stomach and I cursed myself for having been so cowardly and for not having dared to do before what Félix had now done. But when Lea finished her account and confessed to me that, because of how close we were to each other, she had felt obliged to tell me what had happened, since she didn’t know what to do, I, with the masochism that habitually takes possession of me at certain times, hastened to cheer her up: she should accept the situation, how could she doubt that Félix loved her? That turned out to be the most sleepless night I spent in my years at San Marcos.

I went on seeing Félix and Lea, but our relationship gradually grew chillier. Because of the strict propriety that revolutionaries observed in such personal affairs, the fact that both of them were now in love or engaged or living together (I don’t know which, in fact) was invisible simply from watching how they behaved, except for their always going about together, since they were never seen to hold hands, or make any other gesture toward each other that would betray a sentimental relationship between them. But I knew that it existed, and even though they hid it very well whenever I was with them, I felt in my stomach that hollow, upset feeling experienced by resentful bourgeois.

Sometime afterward — perhaps one or two years later — I heard a story about them, told by someone who could not have suspected that I had been in love with Lea. It happened in the cell to which they belonged. They had had some sort of personal dispute, something more serious than a mere tiff. In the cell meeting, Lea all of a sudden accused Félix of acting like a bourgeois toward her and asked for a political analysis of his behavior. The subject took the others by surprise and the session ended in a psychodrama, with Félix engaging in the ritual of self-criticism. For a reason I am unable to explain, that episode, which I heard about long after the fact and perhaps in a distorted form, has been on my mind throughout the years and I have tried many times to reconstruct it and intuit its context and reverberations.

By the time I dropped out of Cahuide, in the middle of the following year, 1954, I hardly ever saw Lea and Félix, and from then on I practically never saw them. We didn’t talk together or seek each other out in the remaining years at San Marcos, exchanging at most a brief hello when we ran into each other as classes were beginning or ending. When I lived in Europe, I had scarcely any news of them, except that they had gotten married and had children, and that both of them, or Félix at least, had followed the jagged trajectory of so many militants of his generation, leaving the Party and going back to it, being a leader of it or suffering from the divisions, ruptures, reconciliations, and new divisions of the Peruvian Communists in the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1972, on the occasion of President Salvador Allende’s visit to Lima, I ran into both of them, at a reception at the Chilean embassy. There among the crowd of guests, we were barely able to exchange even a few words. But I still haven’t forgotten Lea’s joke about Conversation in The Cathedral—“Those demons of yours…” It is a novel in which several episodes of our years at San Marcos appear, transfigured.

Eighteen or twenty years went by without my hearing any more about them. And then one fine day, during the election campaign, on the eve of the launching of my candidacy in Arequipa, in May of 1989, my secretaries handed me the list of journalists who were requesting interviews with me, on which Félix’s name appeared. I immediately granted him an interview, wondering whether it was the same person. It was. Almost four decades older, but still identical to the Félix I remembered: suave and conspiratorial, with the same modesty and the same carelessness in his dress and the same conscientiousness when it came time to ask questions, the ever-exclusive political perspective on the tip of his tongue, and writing for a little periodical as marginal and precarious as the one that we had put out together at San Marcos. I was moved, seeing him, and I imagine that he was too. But neither of us allowed the other to glimpse those embers of sentimentality.

Of my passage through Cahuide the one episode that gave me the feeling that I was working for the revolution was the strike at San Marcos to show our solidarity with the streetcar employees. Their union was controlled by militants from Cahuide. The student section threw itself wholeheartedly into seeing to it that the Federation of San Marcos joined the strike, and we succeeded. Those were exciting days because, for the first time, the members of my cell had the chance to take action outside the university — and with workers! We attended the meetings of the union and put out, with the strikers, in a little print shop in La Victoria, a daily bulletin that we handed out in the places where people who had been left without any means of transportation gathered. And in those days, too, in the meetings of the strike committee, I had the chance to discover several members of Cahuide I’d never known.

How many of us were there? I never found out, but I suspect that there were no more than a few dozen. Just as I never knew, either, who our secretary general was nor who the members of the central committee were. The harsh repression of those years — only after 1955 would the state security system be relaxed, after the fall of Esparza Zañartu — required secrecy with regard to our activities. But it also had to do with the nature of the Party, its conspiratorial predisposition, that vocation for the clandestine that had never permitted it — despite the fact that we talked so much about the prospect — to become a party of the masses.

It was this, in part, that made me fed up with Cahuide. When I stopped going to the meetings of my cell, around June or July of 1954, I had felt bored for some time by the inanity of what we were doing. And I no longer believed a word of our class analyses and our materialist interpretations which, although I wouldn’t have said so straight out to my comrades, seemed puerile to me, a catechism of stereotypes and abstractions, of formulas—“petty bourgeois opportunism,” “revisionism,” “class interest,” “class struggle”—which were used as all-purpose clichés, to explain and defend the most contradictory things. And, above all, because there was in my nature, in my individualism, in my growing vocation as a writer, and in my intractable temperament a visceral inability to embody that patient, tireless, docile revolutionary, a slave to the organization, who accepts and practices democratic centralism once a decision has been arrived at by the organization and all the militants adopt it as their own and apply it with fanatical discipline. Against this, even though I paid lip service to the fact that it was the price of being effective, my whole being rebelled. Ideological differences, which came to me, above all, from Sartre and Les Temps Modernes, of which I was a devoted reader, also played a role in my withdrawing from Cahuide. But I believe that this was a secondary factor. For, despite all that I read in the study circles, what I managed to learn about Marxism at the time was fragmentary and superficial. Only in the 1960s, in Europe, would I make a serious effort to read Marx, Lenin, Mao, and heterodox Marxists such as Lukács, Gramsci, and Goldmann or the superorthodox Althusser, spurred on by the enthusiasm awakened in me by the Cuban revolution, which, from 1960 on, revived that interest in Marxism-Leninism which, ever since I had parted company with Cahuide, I had thought no longer existed.

Although San Marcos, Cahuide, Lea, and Félix had been, for all that time, my all-absorbing preoccupation, I continued to see my aunts and uncles — I dropped by one or another of their houses in turn for lunch or dinner throughout the week — and wrote to Uncle Lucho, to whom I gave a detailed account of everything I was doing or dreaming of doing and from whom I always received letters full of encouraging words. I also saw a great deal of friends from Piura who had come to Lima to prepare for careers at the university, especially Javier Silva. Several of them lived with Javier in a boardinghouse on the Calle Schell, in Miraflores, a place they called Slow Death because of the terrible food they were served. Javier had decided to study architecture and went about disguised as an architect, with a little intellectual’s beard and black turtlenecks, St.-Germain-des-Prés style. I had already convinced him that we had to go off to Paris, and I even encouraged him to write a short story, which I published for him in Turismo. His mysterious text began as follows: “My footsteps took on a larger surface area…” But the following year, he suddenly decided to be an economist and entered San Marcos, so that, from 1954 on, we were also fellow university students.

Thanks to Javier, who had joined it, I resumed contact with my Diego Ferré barrio. I did so a little furtively, because those boys and girls were bourgeois and I had ceased to be one. What would Lea, Félix, or the comrades from Cahuide have said if they saw me, on the corner of the Calle Colón, talking about those “terrific babes” who had just moved to the Calle Ocharán, or planning the Saturday night surprise party? And what would the boys and girls of the barrio have said of Cahuide, an organization which, in addition to being Communist, had Indians, mestizos, and blacks in it like the ones who were servants in their houses? They were two worlds, separated by an abyss. When I went from one to the other I felt I was changing countries.

The ones I saw least in all that time were my parents. They had spent several months in the United States — and then, soon after returning home, my father went back. These visits were yet other attempts to find some sort of job or set up a business that would allow him to move there permanently. My mother stayed with my grandparents, where there was barely room for us. My father’s absence greatly distressed her and I suspected that she was afraid that, in a fit of rage, he would disappear, as he had the first time. But he came back, just as the year 1953 was coming to an end, and one day he summoned me to his office.

I went, feeling very apprehensive, because I never expected anything good to come of his summonses. He told me that my job at Turismo didn’t involve real responsibility, that it was just one I did on the side, and that I should work at something that would allow me to go on building a career for myself at the same time that I was studying at the university, the way so many young people did in the United States. He had already spoken to a friend of his, from the Banco Popular, and a job was waiting for me there, beginning on January 1.

So I began 1954 as a bank clerk, at the Banco Popular branch in La Victoria. On the first day the manager asked me if I had any experience. I told him I had none at all. He gave a whistle, intrigued. “In other words, you got the job through pull?” Yes, I had. “You’re in trouble,” he announced. “Because what I need is a receiving teller. We’ll see how you make out.” It was a rough experience that went on after the eight hours I spent in the office, from Monday to Friday, and it was repeated in nightmares I had about it. I had to receive money from people for their savings passbooks or their current accounts. A great many of the customers were whores from the Jirón Huatica, which was around the corner from the bank branch, and who became impatient because it took me such a long time to count their money and give them a receipt. I dropped the banknotes or messed them all up as I fingered them, and sometimes, when I became completely flustered, I pretended to have finished counting them and gave them the receipt without carefully checking how much they had given me. On many afternoons, the balance didn’t tally and I had to count the cash all over again in a state of real panic. One day I found I was a hundred soles short. Thoroughly downcast, I went to the manager and told him I’d make up the missing sum out of my salary. But with a mere glance at the balance, he found the error and laughed at my inexperience. He was a likable young man, determined that my colleagues appoint me as the branch’s delegate to the union of bank employees, since I was a university student. But I refused to become a union delegate, and I didn’t tell Cahuide about it, since I was certain that they would have asked me to accept. If I took on that responsibility I would have to remain a bank employee, and that was a most unpleasant prospect. I detested the work, the strict working hours, and looked forward to Saturdays the way I had when I was a boarding student at Leoncio Prado.

And then, in my second month at the bank, a chance to escape from making figures balance came my way unexpectedly. I had gone to San Marcos to get my grades and the secretary of the Faculty, Rosita Corpancho, told me that Dr. Porras Barrenechea, for whose course I had received an excellent grade, wanted to see me. I telephoned him, intrigued — I had never spoken alone with him before — and he asked me to come by his house, on the Calle Colina, in Miraflores.

I went there, filled with curiosity, delighted to be able to enter this redoubt whose library and collection of paintings and statues of Don Quixote was spoken of as something mythical. He ushered me into the little study where he usually worked and there, surrounded by a host of books of all sizes and shelves where little statues and portraits of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were lined up, congratulated me on my final exam and the work that I had handed in to him — in which he had seen, with approval, that I had pointed out a historical error on the part of the archaeologist Tschudi — and proposed to me that I work with him. Juan Mejía Baca had commissioned the principal Peruvian historians to put together a collection on the history of Peru. Porras would be responsible for the volumes on the Conquest and the Emancipation. The publisher and chief editor of the series would pay him for two assistants to help him with the bibliography and the documentation. He already had one working with him: Carlos Araníbar, a student who was studying for his degree in history at San Marcos. Did I want to be the other one? My pay would be five hundred soles a month and I would work at his house, from two to five in the afternoon, from Monday to Friday.

I left his house in an indescribable state of euphoria, to write my letter of resignation to the Banco Popular, which I handed to the manager the following morning, without hiding from him the happiness I felt. He couldn’t understand it. Did I realize that I was leaving a steady job for one that would be short-lived? My co-workers at the branch offered me a farewell dinner in a Chinese restaurant in La Victoria, during which they kept teasing me about my customers from the Jirón Huatica, who definitely weren’t going to miss me.

Filled with apprehension, I told my father the news. Despite the fact that I was going on eighteen, my fear of him reappeared on such occasions — a paralyzing sensation that minimized and nullified my arguments even in my own eyes, even on subjects concerning which I was certain that I was right — as well as the malaise I felt whenever he was near at hand, even in the most harmless situations.

He heard me out, turning slightly pale and scrutinizing me with that glacial gaze that I have never seen in anyone else, and once I had finished he demanded that I prove to him that I was going to earn five hundred soles a month. I had to go back to Dr. Porras’s to seek supporting evidence. He gave me the signed document, somewhat surprised, and my father confined himself to heaping scorn on me for a time, telling me that I hadn’t left the bank because the other job was going to be more interesting, but because of my lack of ambition.

And at the same time that I obtained the job with Porras Barrenechea, another fine thing happened to me: Uncle Lucho moved to Lima. Not for the right reasons. A sudden flood of the Chira River, owing to diluvial rains in the Piura mountains, had caused the waters to break through the barriers of the San José farm and destroy all the cotton fields, in a year in which the cleared land had produced plants with very heavy bolls and an exceptional harvest was expected. The investment and efforts of many years were wiped out in a matter of minutes. Uncle Lucho turned the plantation back to its owners, sold his furniture, loaded Aunt Olga and my cousins Wanda, Patricia, and Lucho in his station wagon, and got ready to fight for survival yet again, this time in Lima.

His presence was going to be something wonderful, I thought. The truth was that we needed him. The family had begun to collapse. Grandpa suffered from bad health and had difficulty remembering things. The most alarming case was that of Uncle Juan. Since his arrival from Bolivia he had found a good job, in an industrial company, for he was content and, moreover, a family man, devoted to his wife and children. He had always been fond of drinking more than he should have, but this seemed to be something that he was able to control at will, just a few excesses on weekends, at parties, and at family reunions. However, ever since the death of his mother, a year and a half before, his drinking had been increasing. Uncle Juan’s mother had come from Arequipa to live with him when it was discovered that she had cancer. She played the piano wonderfully well, and when I went to my cousins Nancy and Gladys’s house, I always asked Señora Laura to play the “Melgar” waltz by Luis Duncker Lavalle and other compositions that reminded us of Arequipa. She was a very pious woman, who knew how to die with composure. Her death was Uncle Juan’s downfall. He stayed shut up in the living room of his house, refusing to open the door, drinking until he passed out. From that time on, he used to go on drinking like that, hour after hour, day after day, until the kindly, good-natured person he was when he was sober turned into a violent being who sowed fear and destruction all around him. I suffered as much as Aunt Lala and my cousins because of his downfall, those crises during which he little by little destroyed all his furniture, and kept entering and leaving sanatoriums — cures that he tried over and over and that were always useless — and filling with bitterness and financial hardships a family that he nonetheless adored.

Uncle Pedro had married a very pretty girl, the daughter of the overseer of the San Jacinto hacienda, and after having spent a year in the United States, he and Aunt Rosi were now living on the Paramonga hacienda, whose hospital he was the head of. That family was getting along very well. But Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby were fighting like cats and dogs, and their marriage seemed to be on the rocks. Uncle Jorge had kept on getting better and better jobs. With prosperity, he had acquired an insatiable appetite for entertainment and women, and his dissipations were a source of continual marital quarrels.

The family’s problems affected me deeply. I experienced them as though each one of those dramas in the different households of the Llosas concerned me in the most intimate way. And with more than my share of naïveté, I believed that with Uncle Lucho’s arrival everything was going to be all right again, that thanks to the great righter of wrongs the family would once again be that serene, indestructible tribe, sitting around the big table in Cochabamba for another boisterous Sunday dinner.